—indeed, Pericles himself learnt more from Anaxagoras than from the Rhetoricians.
Writing, continues Socrates, is far inferior to speech. It is a spurious form of knowledge; and Thamuz, the old king of Egypt, was right in denouncing letters as likely to spoil men's memories, and produce an unreal and evanescent learning. Letters, like paintings, "preserve a solemn silence, and have not a word to say for themselves;" and, like hothouse plants, they come quickly to their bloom, and as quickly fade away. "Nobler far," he says, "is the serious pursuit of the dialectician, who finds a congenial soil, and there with knowledge engrafts and sows words which are able to help themselves and him who planted them, and are not unfruitful, but have in them seeds which may bear fruit in other natures nurtured in other ways—making the seed everlasting, and the possessors happy to the utmost extent of human happiness."[1]
But severe as he is on ordinary Rhetoricians, he makes an exception in favour of Isocrates. Some divine instinct tells him that the temper of this young orator is cast in a finer mould than that of Lysias and his coterie; and that some day, when he grows older, his genius will surpass all the speakers of his day.
The heat of the day is now past, and the two friends prepare to depart; but first Socrates offers a solemn prayer to the deities who guard this charming spot where they have been resting all the afternoon.
- ↑ Jowett's Plato, i. 614.
